Rush
to War: How the American government and American identity were hijacked

April
9, 2003

America's
allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United
States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve?
Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism
are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept
the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist
bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's
close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President
Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians
who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections
to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had
been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.

Equally
wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are
evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative
propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is
complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore
or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of sparsely
populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college
and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled
by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the
welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans.

Both
the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are
reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy
is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world.
The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable
contingencies -- such as the selection rather than election of George
W. Bush, and Sept. 11 -- the foreign policy of the world's only global
power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either
the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.

The
core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals.
(They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started
off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far
right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind
of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead
who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself
is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon;
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who
is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned
to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams,
recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security
Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director,
who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in
the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned
his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after
a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in
the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's
office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and
distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

Most
neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left,
not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American
sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed
into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally
into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in
American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli
Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's
1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts
of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their
revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow
Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution
mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American
Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.

The
neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual
Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical "pentagon" of
the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks,
foundations and media empires. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) provide homes for neocon "in-and-outers" when
they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes
not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations,
such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates
of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect
business interests in any direct way. The neocons are ideologues, not
opportunists.

The
major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby
is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts
by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired general
Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In
October 2000, he cosigned a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe
that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces
have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated
by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."

The
Israeli lobby's Christian and Jewish wings:
How neoconservatives conquered Washington -- and launched a war

The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings.
Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby.
Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's
liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given
an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel
activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborated
with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli
government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories,
and crush Yasser Arafat's government.

Such
experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore
in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate
are Southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes
that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations
spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

The
final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several
right-wing media empires, with roots -- odd as it seems -- in the British
Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda
through his Fox television network. His magazine, the Weekly Standard
-- edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle
(vice president, 1989-1993) -- acts as a mouthpiece for defense intellectuals
such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's
government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor,
1991-1994) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post
and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.

Strangest
of all is the media network centered on the Washington Times -- owned
by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Rev. Sun Myung Moon
-- which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the
ghostwriter for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad
Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "gotcha!" style
of right-wing British journalism, and its Europhobic substance, have
contaminated the US conservative movement.

The
corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the
1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol
out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a P.R. technique pioneered
by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neocons published a series of
public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other
future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the
U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against
the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favorite).
During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign
policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically
being studied.

How
did the neocon defense intellectuals -- a small group at odds with most
of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic --
manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during
the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be
like the first -- a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first
Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process --
and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated
by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent
Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it
became clear that Bush would get the nomination.

Then
they had a stroke of luck -- Cheney was put in charge of the presidential
transition (the period between the election in November and the accession
to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration
with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president
in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found
himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz,
Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.

The
neocons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike
his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China,
director of the CIA, and vice president, George W was a thinly educated
playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor
of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor
has more power). His father is essentially a northeastern moderate Republican;
George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination
of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of
upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to Southern fundamentalism
in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration
for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to
liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the Southern
culture.

The
younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie,"
as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked:
a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There
are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading
son: Last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including
Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an
invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the U.N.

It
is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that
Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe
that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's
"weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons
say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The
Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout
the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible
links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz
and others called on the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah
bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with
U.S. attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the
purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle
East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism.
Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed
at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather
than the U.S. The neocons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational
measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the U.S., a far
greater problem.

So
that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington
and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible
threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the
world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance
and personality. After the al-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would
likely have gone to war to topple bin Laden's Taliban protectors in
Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S. has done since then would
have been different had America's 18th century electoral rules not given
Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to
turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.